Periods of English Literature

Old English (Anglo-Saxon) Period (450–1066)

The term Anglo-Saxon comes from two Germanic tribes, the Angles and the Saxons. This period of literature dates
back to their invasion (along with the Jutes) of Celtic England circa 450. The era ends in 1066, when Norman France,
under William, conquered England. Much of the first half of this period, prior to the seventh century, at least, had oral
literature. A lot of the prose during this time was a translation of something else or legal, medical, or religious in nature;
however, some works, such as "Beowulf," and those by period poets Caedmon and Cynewulf, are important.

Middle English Period (1066–1500)

The Middle English period sees a huge transition in the language, culture, and lifestyle of England and results in what
we can recognize today as a form of “modern” (recognizable) English. The era extends to around 1500. As with the Old
English period, much of the Middle English writings were religious in nature; however, from about 1350 onward, secular
literature began to rise. This period is home to the likes of Chaucer, Thomas Malory, and Robert Henryson. Notable
works include "Piers Plowman" and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight."

The Renaissance (1500–1660)

Recently, critics and literary historians have begun to call this the “Early Modern” period, but here we retain the
historically familiar term “Renaissance.” This period is often subdivided into four parts, including the Elizabethan Age
(1558–1603), the Jacobean Age (1603–1625), the Caroline Age (1625–1649), and the Commonwealth Period (1649–
1660).

The Elizabethan Age was the golden age of English drama. Some of its noteworthy figures include Christopher Marlowe,
Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh, and, of course, William Shakespeare. The Jacobean Age is
named for the reign of James I. It includes the works of John Donne, Shakespeare, Michael Drayton, John Webster,
Elizabeth Cary, Ben Jonson, and Lady Mary Wroth. The King James translation of the Bible also appeared during the
Jacobean Age. The Caroline Age covers the reign of Charles I (“Carolus”). John Milton, Robert Burton, and George
Herbert are some of the notable figures.

Finally, the Commonwealth Age was so named for the period between the end of the English Civil War and the
restoration of the Stuart monarchy. This is the time when Oliver Cromwell, a Puritan, led Parliament, who ruled the
nation. At this time, public theaters were closed (for nearly two decades) to prevent public assembly and to combat
moral and religious transgressions. John Milton and Thomas Hobbes’ political writings appeared and, while drama
suffered, prose writers such as Thomas Fuller, Abraham Cowley, and Andrew Marvell published prolifically.

The Neoclassical Period (1600–1785)

The Neoclassical period is also subdivided into ages, including The Restoration (1660–1700), The Augustan Age
(1700–1745), and The Age of Sensibility (1745–1785). The Restoration period sees some response to the puritanical
age, especially in the theater. Restoration comedies (comedies of manner) developed during this time under the talent
of playwrights such as William Congreve and John Dryden. Satire, too, became quite popular, as evidenced by the
success of Samuel Butler. Other notable writers of the age include Aphra Behn, John Bunyan, and John Locke.

The Augustan Age was the time of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, who imitated those first Augustans and even
drew parallels between themselves and the first set. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a poet, was prolific at this time and
noted for challenging stereotypically female roles. Daniel Defoe was also popular.

The Age of Sensibility (sometimes referred to as the Age of Johnson) was the time of Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon,
Hester Lynch Thrale, James Boswell, and, of course, Samuel Johnson. Ideas such as neoclassicism, a critical and
literary mode, and the Enlightenment, a particular worldview shared by many intellectuals, were championed during this
age. Novelists to explore include Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett, and Laurence Sterne, as well
as the poets William Cowper and Thomas Percy.
The Romantic Period (1785–1832)

The beginning date for the Romantic period is often debated. Some claim it is 1785, immediately following the Age of
Sensibility. Others say it began in 1789 with the start of the French Revolution, and still, others believe that 1798, the
publication year for William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s book "Lyrical Ballads," is its true beginning. The
time period ends with the passage of the Reform Bill (which signaled the Victorian Era) and with the death of Sir Walter
Scott. American literature has its own Romantic period, but typically when one speaks of Romanticism, one is referring
to this great and diverse age of British literature, perhaps the most popular and well-known of all literary ages. This era
includes the works of such juggernauts as Wordsworth, Coleridge, William Blake, Lord Byron, John Keats, Charles
Lamb, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas De Quincey, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley. There is also
a minor period, also quite popular (between 1786–1800), called the Gothic era.

Writers of note for this period include Matthew Lewis, Anne Radcliffe, and William Beckford.

The Victorian Period (1832–1901)

This period is named for the reign of Queen Victoria, who ascended to the throne in 1837, and it lasts until her death in
1901. It was a time of great social, religious, intellectual, and economic issues, heralded by the passage of the Reform
Bill, which expanded voting rights. The period has often been divided into “Early” (1832–1848), “Mid” (1848–1870) and
“Late” (1870–1901) periods or into two phases, that of the Pre-Raphaelites (1848–1860) and that of Aestheticism and
Decadence (1880–1901). This period is in strong contention with the Romantic period for being the most popular,
influential, and prolific period in all of English (and world) literature. Poets of this time include Robert and Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold, among others. Thomas Carlyle, John
Ruskin, and Walter Pater were advancing the essay form at this time. Finally, prose fiction truly found its place under
the auspices of Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans),
Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Samuel Butler.

The Edwardian Period (1901–1914)

This period is named for King Edward VII and covers the period between Victoria’s death and the outbreak of World
War I. Although a short period (and a short reign for Edward VII), the era includes incredible classic novelists such as
Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, and Henry James (who was born in America but who
spent most of his writing career in England), notable poets such as Alfred Noyes and William Butler Yeats, as well as
dramatists such as James Barrie, George Bernard Shaw, and John Galsworthy.

The Georgian Period (1910–1936)

The Georgian period usually refers to the reign of George V (1910–1936) but sometimes also includes the reigns of the
four successive Georges from 1714–1830. Here, we refer to the former description as it applies chronologically and
covers, for example, the Georgian poets, such as Ralph Hodgson, John Masefield, W.H. Davies, and Rupert Brooke.
Georgian poetry today is typically considered to be the works of minor poets anthologized by Edward Marsh. The themes
and subject matter tended to be rural or pastoral in nature, treated delicately and traditionally rather than with passion
(like was found in the previous periods) or with experimentation (as would be seen in the upcoming modern period).

The Modern Period (1914–?)

The modern period traditionally applies to works written after the start of World War I. Common features include bold
experimentation with subject matter, style, and form, encompassing narrative, verse, and drama. W.B. Yeats’ words,
“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold” are often referred to when describing the core tenet or “feeling” of modernist
concerns. Some of the most notable writers of this period, among many, include the novelists James Joyce, Virginia
Woolf, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Dorothy Richardson, Graham Greene, E.M. Forster, and Doris
Lessing; the poets W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Seamus Heaney, Wilfred Owens, Dylan Thomas, and Robert
Graves; and the dramatists Tom Stoppard, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Frank McGuinness, Harold Pinter,
and Caryl Churchill. New Criticism also appeared at this time, led by the likes of Woolf, Eliot, William Empson, and
others, which reinvigorated literary criticism in general. It is difficult to say whether modernism has ended, though we
know that postmodernism has developed after and from it; for now, the genre remains ongoing.
The Postmodern Period (1945–?)

The postmodern period begins about the time that World War II ended. Many believe it is a direct response to
modernism. Some say the period ended about 1990, but it is likely too soon to declare this period
closed. Poststructuralist literary theory and criticism developed during this time. Some notable writers of the period
include Samuel Beckett, Joseph Heller, Anthony Burgess, John Fowles, Penelope M. Lively, and Iain Banks. Many
postmodern authors wrote during the modern period as well.

The Colonial and Early National Period (17th century to 1830)

The first European settlers of North America wrote about their experiences starting in the 1600s. This was the earliest
American literature: practical, straightforward, often derivative of literature in Great Britain, and focused on the future.

In its earliest days, during the 1600s, American literature consisted mostly of practical nonfiction written by
British settlers who populated the colonies that would become the United States.
John Smith wrote histories of Virginia based on his experiences as an English explorer and a president of the
Jamestown Colony. These histories, published in 1608 and 1624, are among the earliest works of American literature.
Nathaniel Ward and John Winthrop wrote books on religion, a topic of central concern in colonial America.
Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) may be the earliest collection of poetry written
in and about America, although it was published in England.
A new era began when the United States declared its independence in 1776, and much new writing addressed
the country’s future. American poetry and fiction were largely modeled on what was being published overseas
in Great Britain, and much of what American readers consumed also came from Great Britain.
The Federalist Papers (1787–88), by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, shaped the political direction
of the United States.
Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, which he wrote during the 1770s and ’80s, told a quintessentially American life
story.
Phillis Wheatley, an African woman enslaved in Boston, wrote the first African American book, Poems on Various
Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). Philip Freneau was another notable poet of the era.
The first American novel, The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown, was published in 1789.
Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, The Interesting Narrative (1789), was among the earliest slave narratives and a
forceful argument for abolition.
By the first decades of the 19th century, a truly American literature began to emerge. Though still derived from
British literary tradition, the short stories and novels published from 1800 through the 1820s began to depict
American society and explore the American landscape in an unprecedented manner.
Washington Irving published the collection of short stories and essays The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in
1819–20. It included “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” two of the earliest American short stories.
James Fenimore Cooper wrote novels of adventure about the frontiersman Natty Bumppo. These novels, called the
Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41), depict his experiences in the American wilderness in both realistic and highly
romanticized ways.

The Romantic Period (1830 to 1870)

Romanticism is a way of thinking that values the individual over the group, the subjective over the objective, and a
person’s emotional experience over reason. It also values the wildness of nature over human-made order. Romanticism
as a worldview took hold in western Europe in the late 18th century, and American writers embraced it in the early 19th
century.
Edgar Allan Poe most vividly depicted, and inhabited, the role of the Romantic individual—a genius, often
tormented and always struggling against convention—during the 1830s and up to his mysterious death in 1849.
Poe invented the modern detective story with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841).

The poem “The Raven” (1845) is a gloomy depiction of lost love. Its eeriness is intensified by its meter and rhyme
scheme.
The short stories “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846) are gripping tales of
horror.

In New England, several different groups of writers and thinkers emerged after 1830, each exploring the
experiences of individuals in different segments of American society.
 James Russell Lowell was among those who used humor and dialect in verse and prose to depict everyday life in the
Northeast.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes were the most prominent of the upper-class Brahmins, who
filtered their depiction of America through European models and sensibilities.
The Transcendentalists developed an elaborate philosophy that saw in all of creation a unified whole. Ralph Waldo
Emerson wrote influential essays, while Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden (1854), an account of his life alone by
Walden Pond. Margaret Fuller was editor of The Dial, an important Transcendentalist magazine.
Three men—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman—began publishing novels, short
stories, and poetry during the Romantic period that became some of the most-enduring works of American
literature.
As a young man, Nathaniel Hawthorne published short stories, most notable among them the allegorical “Young
Goodman Brown” (1835). In the 1840s he crossed paths with the Transcendentalists before he started writing his two
most significant novels—The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851).
Herman Melville was one of Hawthorne’s friends and neighbors. Hawthorne was also a strong influence on
Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), which was the culmination of Melville’s early life of traveling and writing.
Walt Whitman wrote poetry that described his home, New York City. He refused the traditional constraints of rhyme and
meter in favor of free verse in Leaves of Grass (1855), and his frankness in subject matter and tone repelled some
critics. But the book, which went through many subsequent editions, became a landmark in American poetry, and it
epitomized the ethos of the Romantic period.
During the 1850s, as the United States headed toward civil war, more and more stories by and about enslaved
and free African Americans were written.
William Wells Brown published what is considered the first black American novel, Clotel, in 1853. He also wrote the first
African American play to be published, The Escape (1858).
In 1859 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Harriet E. Wilson became the first black women to publish fiction in the
United States.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first published serially 1851–52, is credited with raising opposition in the
North to slavery.
Emily Dickinson lived a life quite unlike other writers of the Romantic period: she lived largely in seclusion;
only a handful of her poems were published before her death in 1886; and she was a woman working at a time
when men dominated the literary scene. Yet her poems express a Romantic vision as clearly as Walt Whitman’s
or Edgar Allan Poe’s. They are sharp-edged and emotionally intense. Five of her notable poems are
“I’m Nobody! Who are you?”

“Because I could not stop for Death –”

“My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun”

“A Bird, came down the Walk –”

“Safe in their Alabaster Chambers”

 Realism and Naturalism (1870 to 1910)

The human cost of the Civil War in the United States was immense: more than 2.3 million soldiers fought in the war,
and perhaps as many as 851,000 people died in 1861–65. Walt Whitman claimed that “a great literature will…arise out
of the era of those four years,” and what emerged in the following decades was a literature that presented a detailed
and unembellished vision of the world as it truly was. This was the essence of realism. Naturalism was an intensified
form of realism. After the grim realities of a devastating war, they became writers’ primary mode of expression.
Samuel Clemens was a typesetter, a journalist, a riverboat captain, and an itinerant laborer before he became,
in 1863 at age 27, Mark Twain. He first used that name while reporting on politics in the Nevada Territory. It then
appeared on the short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” published in 1865, which
catapulted him to national fame. Twain’s story was a humorous tall tale, but its characters were realistic
depictions of actual Americans. Twain deployed this combination of humor and realism throughout his
writing. Some of his notable works include
Major novels: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
Travel narratives: The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), Life on the Mississippi (1883)
Short stories: “Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn” (1880), “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1899)
 Naturalism, like realism, was a literary movement that drew inspiration from French authors of the 19th century
who sought to document, through fiction, the reality that they saw around them, particularly among the middle
and working classes living in cities.
Theodore Dreiser was foremost among American writers who embraced naturalism. His Sister Carrie (1900) is the most
important American naturalist novel.
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895), by Stephen Crane,
and McTeague (1899), The Octopus (1901), and The Pit (1903), by Frank Norris, are novels that vividly depict the
reality of urban life, war, and capitalism.
Paul Laurence Dunbar was an African American writer who wrote poetry in black dialect—“Possum,” “When de Co’n
Pone’s Hot”—that were popular with his white audience and gave them what they believed was reality for black
Americans. Dunbar also wrote poems not in dialect—“We Wear the Mask,” “Sympathy”—that exposed the reality of
racism in America during Reconstruction and afterward.
Henry James shared the view of the realists and naturalists that literature ought to present reality, but his
writing style and use of literary form sought to also create an aesthetic experience, not simply document truth.
He was preoccupied with the clash in values between the United States and Europe. His writing shows features
of both 19th-century realism and naturalism and 20th-century modernism. Some of his notable novels are
The American (1877)
The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
What Maisie Knew (1897)
The Wings of the Dove (1902)
The Golden Bowl (1904)

 The Modernist Period (1910 to 1945)

Advances in science and technology in Western countries rapidly intensified at the start of the 20th century and brought
about a sense of unprecedented progress. The devastation of World War I and the Great Depression also caused
widespread suffering in Europe and the United States. These contradictory impulses can be found swirling
within modernism, a movement in the arts defined first and foremost as a radical break from the past. But this break
was often an act of destruction, and it caused a loss of faith in traditional structures and beliefs. Despite, or perhaps
because of, these contradictory impulses, the modernist period proved to be one of the richest and most productive in
American literature.
A sense of disillusionment and loss pervades much American modernist fiction. That sense may be centered
on specific individuals, or it may be directed toward American society or toward civilization generally. It may
generate a nihilistic, destructive impulse, or it may express hope at the prospect of change.
F. Scott Fitzgerald skewered the American Dream in The Great Gatsby (1925).
Richard Wright exposed and attacked American racism in Native Son (1940).
Zora Neale Hurston told the story of a black woman’s three marriages in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
Ernest Hemingway’s early novels The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) articulated the
disillusionment of the Lost Generation.
Willa Cather told hopeful stories of the American frontier, set mostly on the Great Plains, in O Pioneers! (1913) and My
Ántonia (1918).
William Faulkner used stream-of-consciousness monologues and other formal techniques to break from past literary
practice in The Sound and the Fury (1929).
John Steinbeck depicted the difficult lives of migrant workers in Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of
Wrath (1939).
T.S. Eliot was an American by birth and, as of 1927, a British subject by choice. His fragmentary,
multivoiced The Waste Land (1922) is the quintessential modernist poem, but his was not the dominant voice
among American modernist poets.
Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg evocatively described the regions—New England and the Midwest, respectively—in
which they lived.
The Harlem Renaissance produced a rich coterie of poets, among them Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude
McKay, and Alice Dunbar Nelson.
Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912 and made it the most important organ for poetry not just
in the United States but for the English-speaking world.
During the 1920s Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, and E.E. Cummings expressed a spirit of revolution and
experimentation in their poetry.
Drama came to prominence for the first time in the United States in the early 20th century. Playwrights drew
inspiration from European theater but created plays that were uniquely and enduringly American.
Eugene O’Neill was the foremost American playwright of the period. His Long Day’s Journey into Night (written 1939–
41, performed 1956) was the high point of more than 20 years of creativity that began in 1920 with Beyond the
Horizon and concluded with The Iceman Cometh (written 1939, performed 1946).
 During the 1930s Lillian Hellman, Clifford Odets, and Langston Hughes wrote plays that exposed injustice in America.
Thornton Wilder presented a realistic (and enormously influential) vision of small-town America in Our Town, first
produced in 1938.

 The Contemporary Period (1945 to present)

The United States, which emerged from World War II confident and economically strong, entered the Cold War in the
late 1940s. This conflict with the Soviet Union shaped global politics for more than four decades, and the proxy wars
and threat of nuclear annihilation that came to define it were just some of the influences shaping American literature
during the second half of the 20th century. The 1950s and ’60s brought significant cultural shifts within the United States
driven by the civil rights movement and the women’s movement. Prior to the last decades of the 20th century, American
literature was largely the story of dead white men who had created Art and of living white men doing the same. By the
turn of the 21st century, American literature had become a much more complex and inclusive story grounded on a wide-
ranging body of past writings produced in the United States by people of different backgrounds and open to more
Americans in the present day.

Literature written by African Americans during the contemporary period was shaped in many ways by Richard
Wright, whose autobiography Black Boy was published in 1945. He left the United States for France after World
War II, repulsed by the injustice and discrimination he faced as a black man in America; other black writers
working from the 1950s through the 1970s also wrestled with the desires to escape an unjust society and to
change it.
Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952) tells the story of an unnamed black man adrift in, and ignored by, America.
James Baldwin wrote essays, novels, and plays on race and sexuality throughout his life, but his first novel, Go Tell It
on the Mountain (1953), was his most accomplished and influential.
Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, a play about the effects of racism in Chicago, was first performed in 1959.
Gwendolyn Brooks became, in 1950, the first African American poet to win a Pulitzer Prize.
The Black Arts movement was grounded in the tenets of black nationalism and sought to generate a uniquely black
consciousness. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), by Malcolm X and Alex Haley, is among its most-lasting
literary expressions.
Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), launched a writing career that would put the lives of black women at
its center. She received a Nobel Prize in 1993.
In the 1960s Alice Walker began writing novels, poetry, and short stories that reflected her involvement in the civil rights
movement.
The American novel took on a dizzying number of forms after World War II. Realist, metafictional, postmodern,
absurdist, autobiographical, short, long, fragmentary, feminist, stream of consciousness—these and dozens
more labels can be applied to the vast output of American novelists. Little holds them together beyond their
chronological proximity and engagement with contemporary American society. Among representative novels are
Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead (1948), The Executioner’s Song (1979)
Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita (1955)
Jack Kerouac: On the Road (1957)
Thomas Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
Eudora Welty: The Optimist’s Daughter (1972)
Philip Roth: Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), American Pastoral (1997)
Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
Saul Bellow: Humboldt’s Gift (1975)
Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987)
Alice Walker: The Color Purple (1982)
Sandra Cisneros: The House on Mango Street (1983)
Jamaica Kincaid: Annie John (1984)
Maxine Hong Kingston: Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989)
David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest (1996)
Don DeLillo: Underworld (1997)
Ha Jin: Waiting (1999)
Jonathan Franzen: The Corrections (2001)
Junot Díaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)
Colson Whitehead: The Underground Railroad (2016)
The Beat movement was short-lived—starting and ending in the 1950s—but had a lasting influence on
American poetry during the contemporary period. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) pushed aside the formal,
largely traditional poetic conventions that had come to dominate American poetry. Raucous, profane, and
deeply moving, Howl reset Americans’ expectations for poetry during the second half of the 20th century and
beyond. Among the important poets of this period are
Anne Sexton
Sylvia Plath
John Berryman
Donald Hall
Elizabeth Bishop
James Merrill
Nikki Giovanni
Robert Pinsky
Adrienne Rich
Rita Dove
Yusef Komunyakaa
W.S. Merwin
Tracy K. Smith
In the early decades of the contemporary period, American drama was dominated by three men: Arthur
Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee. Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) questioned the American
Dream through the destruction of its main character, while Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) excavated his characters’ dreams and frustrations. Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? (1962) rendered what might have been a benign domestic situation into something vicious and cruel.
By the 1970s the face of American drama had begun to change, and it continued to diversify into the 21st
century. Notable dramatists include
David Mamet
Amiri Baraka
Sam Shepard
August Wilson
Ntozake Shange
Wendy Wasserstein
Tony Kushner
David Henry Hwang
Richard Greenberg
Suzan-Lori Parks

English literature means different things in different contexts. Literature comes from the Latin word "litera" which
means "acquainted with letters." All definitions of literature agree that English literature includes literary works like
novels, stories, poems, nonfiction and plays composed in English.

Literature of power means that the function of literature as power is to move the heart and mind of the readers. The
second is literature of knowledge. Literature of knowledge has function to teach. It means that literature gives
particular values, messages, and themes to the readers.

Poetry
literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive
style and rhythm; poems collectively or as a genre of literature.
Prose
written or spoken language in its ordinary form, without metrical structure.
Drama
an exciting, emotional, or unexpected series of events or set of circumstances.